Romney is what the country needs now

The single most important issue in this election is ending the national nightmare of Obamacare.

If Obamacare is not stopped, it will permanently change the political culture of this country. There will be no going back. America will become a less productive, less wealthy nation. What wealth remains will have to be plowed into Obamacare — to the delight only of the tens of thousands of government bureaucrats administering it.

There won’t be one moment marking the end of America. Everything will just gradually get worse, like trains and the tax code, until a bustling, prosperous nation is as distant a memory as pleasurable train travel and one-page tax returns.

The reason we have Obamacare is not because the public was clamoring for the federal government to take over health care. It’s because the Democrats had 60 senators. In the frozen ideology of the left, it doesn’t matter if anyone wants government health care.

Democrats had been waiting around for 50 years to win huge majorities in the House and Senate and the presidency, so they could check off this box on “FDR’s Unfinished Business.”

Unlike all other major legislation in the nation’s history, Obamacare was passed exclusively by one party that had just won an aberrationally large majority in Congress. Not a single Republican in either the House or Senate voted for it.

Republicans have passed legislation on such partisan votes, too, but never something that would fundamentally change the lives of every living American. Nationalizing one-sixth of the economy is not the kind of thing that should be passed by one party sneering, “Ha, ha — we have 60 votes!”

As soon as all Americans have been thrown off their employer-provided insurance plans and are forced to start depending on the government for health care, Republicans will never be able to repeal it.

The private insurance market will be gone. Most Americans won’t be able to conceive of getting health care that doesn’t come from the government — just as people in the Soviet Union couldn’t imagine how they’d get bread if the government didn’t provide it.

(Also similar to Communist systems, you’ll have to know someone in power to get decent medical care.)

A powerful health care Leviathan will arise, composed of self-paced, well-pensioned, unionized government workers who will manage our health care from 10 a.m.-3 p.m., except federal holidays, sick days, mental health days and in bad weather. (The day after Hurricane Sandy, everything was open on the mostly unaffected Upper East Side of New York — but not the post office.)

This new phalanx of government workers will spend the bulk of their time campaigning to ensure the election of more Democrats who promise to lessen their workload and increase their benefits. Even Republicans will have to run for office promising only to enlarge Obamacare. Newt Gingrich will be calling plans to alter Obamacare “right-wing social engineering.”